


Outside Perspectives

by IncognitoDuck11



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Private Investigators
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:33:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29004546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncognitoDuck11/pseuds/IncognitoDuck11
Summary: One a hard-boiled, genderbent P.I. straight out of a film noir, armed with a gun, grit, and one hell of a sharp mind. Unstable? Maybe. An addict? Yes. Too curious for her own good? Definitely.The other a spunky artist that makes a living snapping up photos of blood splatter and brain matter for the tabloids. She's got a bad case of paranoia hollowing out her big bleeding heart and a scandal nipping at her cheetah-print heels. But she's smart enough to know that she can't run forever.What do these two have in common? Outside perspective. They're paid to have it. They were born with it.But what happens when the watchers become the watched?
Relationships: Spencer Hastings/Aria Montgomery
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	Outside Perspectives

**Author's Note:**

> Another start to a longer story. I've had this idea brewing for about a year now. Time to finally get it written down.

-.-.-.-

Lingering on the outer edges of a crush of people awash with shock and horror, Aria Montgomery readies her camera. Gasps slice through the night air like knives, the smell of vomit wafts toward her, and the cops are defending their perimeter with increasing desperation. She wrinkles her nose at the bypasser retching into the bushes nearby, and her heart goes out to the poor souls with stars on their chests. Half circles hang under their eyes like the moon in the sky, and they shift on aching feet. 

Her heels click on the pavement as she approaches, and she draws her shoulders up into a defensive posture, clutches her camera tighter. She gets closer, and the smell of death nearly knocks her off her feet. It's sweet, raw, foul. Elbowing her way through her fellow onlookers, she cranes her neck to get a glimpse. She’s too short to get a clear view, though.

“Watch it!” a man hisses at her as she shoves closer to the ring of yellow tape. She makes it a point to step on his toes, and he sizes her up, glaring at the equipment hanging from her neck. “Fucking vulture.” 

She ignores him, and makes her way finally to the inside circle of police. Peering past a broad shoulder, she gets a view of the body. He’s been rotting for a while, whoever he is, and her eyes stay locked on him, the grimace forever frozen on his lips, the exposed chunks of bone and tendon. Now for the fun part: figuring out the perfect angle to capture him from. 

After a moment’s deliberation and a few snapshots from street view, Aria decides her shot would best be taken from above. 

Her shoes slip on the rungs of a rusty fire escape ladder, but she scales the side of a dismal apartment building until she’s standing on the roof. The Rosewood skyline is pretty from here, low-key and packed with ancient brick structures, and for a moment she forgets why she hates this town. In the viewfinder, it just looks like a place on a postcard. Then she pans toward the edges, which are crowded with silhouettes, menacing clusters of oaks and pines, and she thinks she can see ghosts weaving through their leaves. 

Suddenly, she’s remembering mosquito bites and the snap of a screen door. Whispering in the pitch dark of her cabin to her bunkmate below. She remembers sneaking away, clammy fingers laced with her own, and lips on her neck as lake water sloshes shore. It all goes by in a split second, but it leaves her feeling like someone just scooped out her insides. The wind cuts through her like she’s nothing, and she shivers. 

_ Focus _ , she tells herself, directing her lens downward, where an eye stares back at her. It’s pupil is that of the rotting victim, where he’s sprawled on the ground. Around it is an iris of uniforms struggling to hold back the anxious bodies of onlookers, which make up the white of the eye. From this bird’s eye view, she can get a perfect shot. 

When she zooms in, she notices the dead man’s eyes are staring right at her. Death is saying hello, and she supposes that she’s been rude, chasing it around like this, never stopping to flirt. Never acknowledging its existence as something that could happen to her, too. His grimace looks more like a smile, suddenly. She zooms in further; notices his teeth are tinged pink and his skin is mottled with blues and purples and greens. It’s surprisingly colorful, and she wonders why everyone thinks the reaper cloaks himself in black. 

_ Click, click, click.  _

She’s got photos of him on a flash drive, documenting him in various stages of action, almost everyday. Like she’s building a case file so she can stop him. Or a shrine so she can worship him. She’s not sure which it is, but for now she prefers to keep her distance. He’ll try to nip at her heels every now and then, that’s for sure, but she’s got practice outrunning the messy things. 

He’s not gonna catch up anytime soon. 

It’s spitting rain when she finally gets home that night, and she hoists her purse higher on her shoulder, clutching the strap tightly, her free hand holding onto the pepper spray in her coat pocket. She glances over her shoulder before she enters the building, watches a rat scurry across the sidewalk, thinks she sees a man-shaped shadow under a streetlight in the distance. 

Watching her. 

Her heart lodges itself in her throat and she hurries inside, takes the stairs two at a time, her calves burning all the while. But she doesn't care. All she cares about is getting to her apartment and locking the door. Which she does, once she jiggles the key in the lock and shoves inside. She closes it and clicks the lock on the doorknob, then, knowing from personal experience that a credit card can slip through that defense, she deadbolts it. Slides the chain lock last of all. Finally, she feels somewhat secure. Not safe, exactly. But barricaded. 

He can't get her in here. 

Still, she doesn't take any chances. She clicks the living room light on, then the kitchen, the hallway, the bedroom. She holds onto the pepper spray all the while, checking the closets, under the bed, behind every door and in every place big enough to fit a person. She doesn't have to check the windows; each building in this part of the city has them barred. 

Finally, certain that she's truly alone, she collapses into bed, too tired to even think about showering, or changing her clothes. She stares up at the ceiling, wondering what she should do. She's called the police. They can't do anything to help her unless he makes a more blatant move. Something more extreme than the love letters and silent phone calls, which is bound to be dangerous. 

She does have another option besides the police, but it's someone that probably hasn't given her a second thought in years… 

-.-.-.-

She misses Aria. 

Spencer misses Aria more than she's ever missed anybody in her life, and her absence is a void in her chest that she has trouble filling. She knows it's pathetic. For chrissakes, they were kids the last time they really talked to each other. Seventeen and stupidly believing that what they had would last forever. Spencer was the stupid one. She had trusted Aria whole-heartedly and Aria made the choice that ultimately ripped them apart. 

It's borderline embarrassing to think about, so Spencer tries not to. She tries and she tries and she tries. She takes all the cases that she can, tracks down the scum of the earth until her feet are aching and her brain is spinning. Some nights she gets dirty, ducking down greasy back alleys or breaking into cockroach-infested shacks, and that dirt takes her mind off it. There's no time to think about  _ Aria Aria Aria  _ when some cheating spouse is thinking he can beat her in a foot race. There's no time to think about  _ Aria Aria Aria  _ when she's chatting up a bartender and he pours her more vodka, or when she finds yet another piece of eye candy to talk to. There's no time to think about  _ Aria Aria Aria _ when her kill of the night is panting helplessly in her ear, drowning out coherent thought with every hot, heavy grunt of pleasure they just can't hold back. 

She hunts and she drinks and she gets her man or woman in the end—she always does. She gets what she can convince herself she wants, and it gives her more ink to blot out the truth with. She's definitely not thinking of Aria when she's lying awake at night and avoiding the shadowy realm of her dreams. And she's not wishing it was Aria in her bed instead of some stranger. She never thinks of Aria when she's kicking that stranger out in the morning, and she doesn't go back to bed and curl up under the covers to cry. She doesn't because that's pathetic. And Spencer Hastings isn't someone to feel sorry for. 

Aria never felt sorry for her. 

She misses that. She misses Aria. 

But there's work to be done. So she's leafing through a folder of info, trying to find something that will connect the dots, but there's a headache clawing at her temples. She taps a cigarette out of the half-empty pack that sits on her desk and lights it. Breathes smoke in and out of her lungs until the nicotine goes to work on the kinks in her muscles. She leaves the cancer stick waiting for her in an old brass ashtray, coughs into the back of her hand as she goes through more files. More files. Because there's gotta be something that snags– 

Knock, knock. 

A new client. 

She doesn't glance up as she calls for whoever it is to come in. She ignores the familiar aroma that she knows always occurs when that particular perfume mixes with her own smoke. And she sure as hell doesn't see it coming when she finally decides to pay attention to her next customer. 

“What can I do for–” she starts to say, in the middle of politely stubbing out her cigarette. But she stops dead in her tracks at the eyes that greet her, and the amicable smile that she always plasters across her face when talking business fades. She doesn't know if she wants to scowl or leap across the desk, and neither seem appropriate, so she finds herself staring blankly as one Aria Montgomery teeters toward her on cheetah-print heels. 

Damn. She looks good, maybe better than ever, and Spencer can't help it when her eyes linger at the hem of her ex’s skirt. 

“Aria?” she blurts, redirecting her gaze to somewhere more productive. She takes notice of the expensive camera in the other woman’s hands, and it's definitely not an excuse to check out her—vacant—left ring finger. Then she trails back up to her face, which somehow looks as soft as it is solid. More mature than it was in high school but still beautiful. Her jaw is clenched and her green eyes cautious. She looks undoubtedly different, but distress still shows in the same lines on her face, and Spencer realizes that maybe this isn't a social call after all. “Hey. What do you need?” 

Aria glances warily at the spent corpse of the cigarette, her eyes watering. “Your help,” is her bitter answer. 

“Of course.” Spencer sits upright, gesturing to the ratty armchair sitting in front of the desk. “Please. Sit down.” 

Obliging, Aria blows out a breath as she sinks into the chair. She sits her camera on Spencer's desk and nods at it. “Look at those and tell me what you see.” 

Shooting her ex a bemused look, Spencer takes the thing and thumbs through the photos on it. They're of obsessive love letters, all unsigned. A stalker’s motif if she's ever seen one. “Unless you're looking for my opinion on a new lover of yours, I'd say you don’t know who wrote these.” 

“I don’t,” Aria supplies. “I keep getting them in the mail.” 

There's something desperate in the way she says this, and Spencer kind of hates herself when she replies brusquely, “You tried the police first?” 

“I did. And the most intelligent answer they could come up with was that this might be someone's sick idea of a joke.” 

Despite herself, Spencer smirks, and she reaches for another cigarette. “Certainly sounds like the incompetent bastards of the Rosewood PD.” 

“There’s no fingerprints, no nothing on them.” Aria drags a hand through her hair, frazzled, and Spencer notices the poorly-concealed dark circles under her eyes. The woman sighs again, then trains her eyes on the investigator. “So can you help?” 

Spencer inhales deeply, watching Aria watch her. Blows the smoke out through her teeth. “Yeah, I can help. And I know we have history, but I don't do pro bono, sweetheart.” 

Aria gives her a strained smile, like maybe she didn't expect it to be free, but she wasn't expecting this discussion to happen so soon. “How much?” 

“A hundred an hour. Cash,” Spencer tells her. Licks her lips and sips in more smoke. Taps the ash onto the tray as Aria digs out her wallet, stuffed full of bills that it is. Wow. “So where are you working lately, Ar?” 

Aria visibly bristles, but keeps her tone conversational, light. “Crime scene photographer." 

“Oh. Forensics?” 

“Freelance.” She hastily corrects, counting out her payment. “Pictures go to the tabloids. They pay well for the uglier shots.” She shoots Spencer a sardonic look. “Gotta shock the masses and all.”

Spencer squints back at her as Aria hands over a stack of twenties—because that is such an Aria thing to say—and she smirks as she thumbs through the bills. “Well, you never were the squeamish type.” 

“Neither were you,” Aria challenges, and Spencer glances up at her. “So what does your line of work entail?” 

“A lot of waiting,” is her quickest answer. Then she sits back and thinks harder about it. Snorts. “You wouldn't believe how many people have sex with the windows open. Even cheaters, sneaky as they can be. I get a lot of missing kids cases, too. Custodial disagreements. But it's mostly just people that want to find out what somebody they know is up to. And sometimes people don't like the proof I've got, and I figure that I might end up buried in someone's backyard one day, just another unsolved case for someone else to dig up.” 

“Sounds poetic,” Aria comments idly. “But who's doing the digging?” 

It's a question she doesn't like to think about, it's why she brings a stranger to her empty bed every chance she gets. She takes another drag. “Nobody, I guess. If you remember, I've never been very good at friends. But I've got a job to do and a place to sleep. That's all I want to worry about.” 

“Do you? Sleep, that is.”

“Occasionally,” Spencer supplies, and now it's her turn to bristle. “But you don't have to check up on me, Aria. You haven't for five years.” 

Aria's expression softens considerably, something like guilt flashing across it. “That doesn't mean I haven't thought about you. Worried.” 

Spencer doesn't allow herself to go soft in response to this honesty. She doesn't trust it. Instead, she smooths out her own face. “I suppose that means I should be worried about you,” she says coolly, and it's more of an accusation than a statement or a question. “Now that someone's after you?” 

“No, I guess not,” Aria says. “But if you'll have me, I'd like to help you figure out who's doing this. Maybe we can talk about things along the way?” 

Spencer isn't sure if she even wants to talk. Because maybe Aria is just looking for her forgiveness. Maybe she’ll clear her conscience and get out. Or maybe she really does want to reconcile. Maybe there's still a chance for them. 

But Spencer knows better than to hope. 

-.-.-.-


End file.
